What a long, strange trip it’s been. Once the most popular smartphone platform on the planet by a massive margin, Symbian is now officially dead. The Financial Times on Wednesday reported that Nokia has built and shipped the last batch of Symbian smartphones it will ever produce. The platform will now fade away, remembered only occasionally alongside other mobile operating systems that helped shape an industry before being crushed by their successors. More →
Nokia on Wednesday announced that its 41-megapixel camera-equipped 808 PureView smartphone will begin rolling out later this month in Russia, India and additional unnamed markets. Nokia unveiled the impressive camera phone in February during the annual Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain, and BGR took a hands-on look at the device during the show. While a 41-megapixel sensor coupled with Carl Zeiss optics place the handset in a league of its own, the 808 PureView is powered by the Symbian operating system, which Nokia is currently in the process of dumping in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone. ”PureView has completely raised the bar on imaging performance for the whole smartphone industry – and Nokia is not stopping here,” Nokia smartphone boss Jo Harlow said. “We’re going to carry on developing PureView for our future smartphones in ways that will again revolutionize the imaging experience.” Nokia’s full press release follows below. More →
Google’s Android platform was the most popular mobile operating system in the world’s largest market for mobile phones last year. The platform’s market share grew nearly 35%, capturing 68.4% of the mobile market in China, Reuters reported on Tuesday citing research from Analysys International. Chinese Android manufacturers ZTE and Huawei helped propel the platform to new heights by offering low-cost devices via local wireless carriers. Google’s success came at the expense of Nokia, whose Symbian operating system share was cut in half to 18.7%. Apple’s iOS market share rose from 4.1% in the first quarter of 2011 to 5.7% in the fourth quarter, but the Cupertino-based company is expected to fare far better in 2012 due to high demand and new partnerships. More →
Nokia is in store for yet another rough quarter according to Canaccord Genuity analyst Mike Walkley. The struggling Finnish phone vendor posted a massive €954 million operating loss last quarter, and Walkley thinks the company’s first quarter of 2012 could disappoint again. “We are lowering our estimates ahead of Nokia’s Q1/12 earnings report as our checks indicate weak Symbian sales, seasonally soft feature phone sales, and a slow ramp in Windows smartphones,” the analyst wrote, reiterating a Hold rating on shares of Nokia stock and lowering his price target to $5. Read on for more. More →
Over the past three months, Apple’s iOS operating system and Google’s Android mobile platform both continued to grow — according to comScore, they now account for a combined 80.3% of the U.S. smartphone market. The research showed that 234 million Americans aged 13 and older use mobile devices. Samsung is the most popular manufacturer with a 25.6% share of the U.S. mobile market, followed by LG with a 19.4% share and Apple with 13.5%. Motorola and HTC round out the top five with 12.8% and 6.3%, respectively. More than 104 million Americans now own smartphones, up 14% from November, with Google Android’s operating system surpassing a 50% market share for the first time ever. Apple’s iOS platform ranked second with 30.2% of the smartphone market, followed by RIM with a 13.4% share, Microsoft at 3.9% and Symbian with 1.5%. ComScore’s press release can be found after the break. More →
Many industry watchers argue that software ecosystems now present one of the biggest hurdles to mobile platform owners looking to combat the mobile juggernauts that iOS and Android have become. BGR has been covering the issue for years, and in November 2010 we said that absent apps were a huge barrier for Microsoft as it re-entered the mobile space with Windows Phone. Now, nearly a year and a half later, the Windows Phone platform is being taken a bit more seriously by mobile developers, however the issue of getting premium apps onto the platform in a timely fashion persists. In an effort to combat this problem, Microsoft and Nokia have launched a new program aimed at attracting attention from emerging developers. Read on for more. More →
Nokia’s upcoming Lumia 900 Windows Phone could be the first smartphone running Microsoft’s mobile operating system to really make a splash in the United States. BGR exclusively reported that the new flagship 4G handset will hit AT&T store shelves late next month alongside a massive marketing blitz and a big subsidy program that will leave the phone with a surprisingly low $99.99 price tag. As impressive as the Lumia 900 is shaping up to be, however, Nokia is apparently working on another smartphone with new technology that will blow us all away. Read on for more. More →
Hey folks. Following Nokia’s early morning press conference here in Barcelona, we got a litttttle bit of hands-on time with the freshly dropped Pureview 808. The software isn’t quite finished yet, but we did get some time to play with the audio recording and camera apps. Really cool stuff, and we can definitely see other manufacturers forced to follow suit. The handset features the flagship 41 megapixel camera, a 4″ screen, 512 mb of RAM with 16GB of onboard storage, a 1.3 Ghz single core chip, and a loft 450 Euro pricetag. Expect to see this sucker in May. Hit the link below to check out the gallery!
Information has been appearing in dribs and drabs about Nokia’s last Symbian smartphone, the Nokia 803, but a trusted source of ours has come through with some details that vary a bit from earlier reports. For starters, the Nokia 803 will run Symbian Belle and serve it up on a 4-inch AMOLED display instead of the smaller 3.5-inch screen that had been reported. An HDMI-out port, microSIM support and NFC are all a go as well. We have also been told that the Nokia 803 will feature one of the largest camera sensors — if not the largest camera sensor — ever seen on a mobile phone. The Nokia 803 is currently expected to be released in the May timeframe.
Smartphone shipments overtook client PC shipments for the first time in 2011, according to new data from market research firm Canalys. Vendors shipped a total of 158.5 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, representing a 57% increase compared to the 101.2 million units shipped in the same quarter a year earlier. Shipments for the full year of 2011 rose 63% to 487.7 million units, up from 299.7 million shipped in 2010. The PC market only grew 15% to 414.6 million units in 2011, which included an astonishing 274% increase in tablet shipments — tablets accounted for 15% of all PC shipments last year according to Canalys. The firm expects growth in the smartphone market to slow in 2012, with vendors putting more focus on profitability. Canalys’s press release follows below.
ComScore released its most recent U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share report for the three-month period ending in December, 2011. The research firm found that Samsung remained the top mobile phone vendor in the fourth quarter with a 25.3% market share — the same share as it held in the third quarter. LG’s market share dropped 0.6 percentage points to a 20% share for second place followed by Motorola, which fell 0.5 percentage points to 13.3%. Apple had the fourth largest share with a 12.4% market share, up 2.2 percentage points, and RIM fell 0.4 points to a 6.7% share. Read on for more. More →
Enterprise mobile vendor Good Technology published a new study on Thursday revealing iOS’s massive market share in the corporate world. The iPad accounted for 96% of all tablets in the fourth quarter according to the firm, while the iPhone accounted for 53% of all smartphones activated by more than 2,000 companies using Good’s services in the fourth quarter. Good provides push messaging, device management and security products for corporate mobile users, competing against RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server. The company supports Windows Mobile, Symbian, iOS and Android. Apple’s iOS platform rose from 65% to 71% of Good’s business in the fourth quarter, and the iPhone 4S led the way, accounting for 31% of all smartphone models. The top Android device was Samsung’s Galaxy S II, and both Windows Phone and Symbian were pushed out of the top-10 last quarter. Half of Fortune 100 companies use Good’s services, with just over a third of all mobile device activations made by the financial services industry. Good’s full press release follows below. More →
Usage of Apple’s iOS platform and Google’s Android operating system both declined between November and December as BlackBerry and Symbian both showed gains. Despite huge activations over the holidays, new data released by analytics firm Net Applications shows that Internet usage of iOS on Apple’s iPhone and iPad displayed the sharpest decline in December, dropping to 52.10% from 54.04% in November. Google’s Android platform on smartphones and tablets dipped less than half a point to 16.29% in December but it stayed in the No.3 spot as Java ME gained more ground, climbing to a 21.27% share last month. Also showing usage gains in December were RIM’s BlackBerry platform, up to 3.51% from 3.18% in November, and Symbian, which climbed to 5.76% from 5.27% a month earlier. A chart outlining Net Applications’s data follows below. More →
